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Ian Kershaw is clearly one of the world’s
foremost scholars on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. He has written
numerous works that have become the standard in their respective
fields, including keen analyses of the extent of popular support for
Hitler and the Nazis in “The Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in
the Third Reich (1987), the nature of Nazi rule in Germany in
The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation
(1989), and, most recently, of the Nazi leader himself in Hitler,
1889-1936: Hubris (1999) and Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis
(2000). In Making Friends with Hitler, Kershaw turns his
critical eye to Great Britain’s foreign policy towards Germany
before the Second World War, culminating in the British prime
minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, as well as the
role of Lord Londonderry, a British aristocratic parliamentarian, in
that process. The author seeks to answer many questions: how did
Lord Londonderry manage to get mixed up with the Nazis? Was he
really a Nazi sympathizer or simply misguided? Why did many
observers in Britain share his enthusiasm for Nazism? Were Lord
Londonderry’s strategies for dealing with the Nazis totally
outlandish or did they present a viable alternative that could have
avoided war? Kershaw uses the role of Lord Londonderry as a lens to
examine important historiographical questions concerning the origins
of the Second World War (xvi-xxi).
Kershaw begins by tracing the rise of Lord
Londonderry’s political career. As a descendant of Castlereagh, the
British foreign secretary at the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Lord
“Charley” Londonderry was a prominent member of the British
aristocracy who sought and expected to play a crucial role in
British national affairs at home and abroad. After serving as an
officer on the western front during the First World War, however,
Londonderry was turned down twice for the position of Viceroy of
India in the 1920s (8-17). In fact, it was in large part the efforts
of Winston Churchill, Londonderry’s cousin, which enabled
Londonderry to establish “a toe-hold in central government” as
Under-Secretary of State for Air (13). Londonderry furthered his
political career, at least partially, when he married Lady Frances
Anne Vane-Tempest, who created her own “exclusive dining club of the
rich and famous” dubbed “The Ark” to suggest a place of refuge from
the public sphere, established an intricate network of connections
within elite circles, and exchanged a series of doting letters with
British prime minister Ramsey MacDonald, who in turn appointed Lord
Londonderry Secretary of State for Air in 1931 (22-24).
Kershaw argues that Lord Londonderry’s four-year
term as Air Secretary was mostly a failure. Londonderry did enhance
the British Royal Air Force to some degree, overseeing the designs
for, if not the actual production of, Spitfire and Hurricane
aircraft. However, Londonderry became widely unpopular within
British society due to his two main propositions while in office.
First, he staunchly advocated a gradual increase in the construction
of bomber planes while Britain was in the midst of the Great
Depression. The British public wanted its government to disarm, not
rearm, and concentrate on domestic social spending (67-79). Second,
Londonderry was convinced that Great Britain should address
Germany’s grievances concerning provisions of the Treaty of
Versailles. Kershaw notes that many British observers, especially
conservatives, did not necessarily oppose this attitude, initially
surmising that Nazism, despite its excesses, was “preferable to
Communism” under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union (50).
Unfortunately for Londonderry, this lenient attitude toward the Nazi
regime directly conflicted with French policy, which aimed to keep
Germany weak internationally in order to ensure its own security
(46-49). As a result, Londonderry’s propositions worried wide
segments of British society and, more importantly, alienated many of
his colleagues in the Cabinet who were reluctant to endanger
British-French relations.
Ironically, Kershaw points out that Londonderry
was dismissed from his post as Secretary of State for Air in the
summer of 1935 for neither of those reasons. In March 1935, Hitler
announced that Germany would henceforth ignore the provisions of the
Versailles Treaty, that his country had already secretly amassed a
huge air force consisting of 550 planes, and that Germany would
continue to rearm itself. British public opinion transformed itself
overnight from a pacifist to a militarist stance and demanded a
rapid expansion of armament production, especially in the air force.
Londonderry refused to shift his policy, pointing to the need for a
steady but incremental expansion and, to the shock of the British
Cabinet, berated the government for not listening to him in the
first place (113-17). In June 1935, Stanley Baldwin, the newly
elected prime minister, dismissed Londonderry and awarded him as a
consolation prize the position of Lord Privy Seal, which held
prestige but little influence in British affairs. In November of
that same year, Londonderry was relieved of this post as well for
his continued public criticism of the British Foreign Office,
leaving him deeply embittered against the government for what he
interpreted as a personal affront (119-32). Londonderry’s reaction
to the dismissals also set the stage for his intimate contacts with
the Third Reich.
Almost immediately after his departure from
political office, Londonderry began to establish cordial relations
with Nazi leaders. Kershaw shows how Londonderry exchanged
correspondence with Nazi henchmen such as Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Hitler’s “unofficial” ambassador in London, and Hermann Göring,
commander-in-chief of the German air force (153-56, 161-63), whom he
frequently accompanied on hunting trips. In May 1936, Ribbentrop
visited Londonderry at his Mount Stewart estate in Northern Ireland,
a visit that the local media entitled “swastika over Ulster”
(161-70). During their brief time together, Lord Londonderry and
Ribbentrop discussed the possibilities of a renewed British-German
understanding, the necessity of arms limitation, and the state of
British-French relations. In order to signify the importance of his
visit, Ribbentrop gave the Londonderrys a present, a white porcelain
figure the Londonderrys later referred to as “the stormtrooper”
(170-72). Londonderry strenuously maintained his efforts to create a
British-German rapprochement until shortly before the outbreak of
the Second World War.
Kershaw painstakingly examines Lord Londonderry’s
attitude toward Nazi Germany. He asserts that Londonderry was not a
Nazi sympathizer, but rather strongly believed that Great Britain
should both reach an agreement with Hitler as part of a larger
four-power pact comprising Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, and
that the British should enact a policy of steady, incremental
rearmament in order to negotiate with the Nazis from a position of
strength. Londonderry proclaimed that only through these actions
could another world war be avoided. Kershaw is highly skeptical of
Londonderry’s assertions. The author, who admittedly enters the
realm of speculation to do so, concludes that Londonderry’s policies
would have failed to prevent another world war. If Britain somehow
reached an accord with Germany during the 1930s, it would have been
based on Germany respecting Britain’s sovereignty in Western Europe
and its overseas empire in exchange for a free hand in Eastern
Europe. Kershaw rightly notes that Adolf Hitler still would have
attempted to build a New Order in the East through the annihilation
of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and other eastern peoples. In other words,
Lord Londonderry failed to comprehend the true nature of the Third
Reich, which placed racial war at the center of its monstrous
ambitions rather than as a mere excess of its aim for Germany to
reacquire its pre-1914 status as a world power (340-49).
At the same time, Making Friends with Hitler
is important because Kershaw employs parliamentary debates,
diplomatic correspondence, memoirs, letters, and especially
newspapers to demonstrate convincingly that Lord Londonderry was
certainly not the only individual in interwar Britain to be duped by
Hitler and the Nazis. In the early 1930s several British newspapers,
including The Times, the Manchester Guardian, the
Daily Herald, the News Chronicle, and the Daily Mail
presented wide ranging, often sympathetic views of Hitler (28-35).
Newspapers with leftist leanings underestimated Hitler badly,
frequently stating that he was “not in control of his own party”
(29); print media on the British Right “advocated moderation and the
attempt to construct cordial relations with Germany as with other
nations” (35). Kershaw notes that British government officials also
misunderstood Hitler’s aims, a facet that is particularly striking
considering that the British ambassador in Berlin during Hitler’s
rise to the German chancellorship, Sir Horace Rumbold, sent numerous
reports full of foreboding to the British Foreign Office about the
future of Europe if the Nazi party came to power in Germany (36-46).
In the late 1930s, British politicians were no
less fooled by the intentions of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Upon
visiting Hitler in 1937, Lord Halifax, leader of the House of Lords,
believed that Hitler only wanted to regain territory that Germany
had lost at Versailles (208-12). British leaders and society at
large reacted overwhelmingly positively to the September 1938 Munich
Conference that awarded Nazi Germany the Sudetenland in
Czechoslovakia, the archetype of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement
policy (242-51). Not until Hitler’s entry into Prague in March 1939
did British public opinion take a swift turn against appeasement
(266-76). Kershaw states that, at this point, Lord Londonderry and
other British observers who had desired close British-German
relations also belatedly realized the mistake of trusting the Third
Reich (276-86). Nevertheless, Lord Londonderry’s earlier attempts to
befriend the Nazis made him a Nazi sympathizer in the eyes of the
British public, despite his ubiquitous protestations to the contrary
until his death in 1949 (286-327).
This review cannot do justice to the great number
of provocative insights in Kershaw’s account. His skepticism
regarding Lord Londonderry’s strategies for dealing with the Nazis
demonstrates that “British policy choices were severely constrained”
during the interwar period (46). Moreover, Londonderry’s flirtations
with Nazi Germany “reflected those of his social class,” as many
conservatives in Britain regretted the rise of democratic
institutions and thus viewed some aspects of Nazism favorably (349).
Kershaw’s work is also admirably suited to a diverse audience.
Scholars of Britain, Germany, and the interwar period will
appreciate the author’s careful efforts to evaluate the diplomatic
initiatives and decisions of various individuals. For undergraduates
and general readers, Kershaw provides a cohesive narrative and
analysis of European diplomacy during the 1930s, covering many of
the watershed moments of Nazi aggression and British appeasement.
The author includes several illustrations showing Londonderry’s
intrigues with the Nazis. In summary, Making Friends with Hitler
is an extremely useful addition to the scholarship on the origins of
the Second World War, evoking the range of British public opinion in
the atmosphere of those dark days just before the war.
The University of Tennessee
jhamric@utk.edu |
